Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany said progress in lengthening the duration of living and lowering the odds of death at all ages has been so swift that life expectancy rose faster than it did in the last 200 millennia, since we evolved from apes. 

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, looked at Swedish and Japanese men – two countries with the longest life expectancies today. It concluded that their counterparts in 1800 would have had lifespans that were closer to those of the earliest hunter-gatherer humans than they would to adult men in both countries today.

Those primitive hunter gatherers, at age 30, had the same odds of dying as a modern Swedish or Japanese man would face at 72. Scientists who worked on the study said it was unclear what the possible upper limit for life expectancy would be. “How much longer can we extend life?” said Oskar Burger, lead researcher on the study. “We just don’t know.”

Politically this poses a problem for leftists who do not support the elongating of work. Here is the general argument: the trend is that we live longer. This means we have to work additional years.

Is that so? Perhaps this relatively gained time should be used for leisure — but someone needs to pay and here lies the problem.